Endogenous depression resources for sufferers, their friends and families – compiled by someone who understands

Causes Of Endogenous Depression

Friday, December 23rd, 2011 at
7:03 am

It's caused by A! No, B.. Umm

Historical view of endogenous depression causes.

Historically, endogenous depression has been understood to be caused by an imbalance in brain chemistry. Specifically, it was thought that abnormally low neurotransmitter levels, perhaps due to low baseline production of them, were to blame. Endogenous depression was considered to be at least partially genetic and strongly hereditary; in other words, a family history of endogenous depression would mean that you were highly likely to have it as well and while this would be the case from birth, it was likely to first manifest post-puberty as with other types of depression. Speaking more broadly, endogenous depression (in the historical view) presupposes depression episodes that occur independent of external factors such as adverse life events as opposed to reactive depression, which is brought on solely or primarily by such factors, hence the common moniker of “situational depression“.

Modern view of the causes of endogenous depression.

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The leading opinion in clinical and pharmacological psychiatry research circles holds that endogenous depression is caused by a dysregulation of the endogenous opioid system, but not the other systems such as the monoaminergic system, which is responsible for the well-known neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin. The neurotransmitters implicated are beta-endorphin, dynorphins and met- and leu-enkephalins. Researchers and clinicians alike now use this view as the basis for classifying this sub-type of major depressive disorder.

The sufferer’s opinion on the nature and causes of endogenous depression.

Theory and research are great and, in the long run, are the only way we’re going to get anywhere in our understanding of mental health and mood disorders in particular. Without such understanding, our ability to get effective treatment that is safe, reliable and side-effect free is never going to get beyond where it is now, which is almost nowhere. However, such thorough understanding is a long way off and as such, anecdotal and experiential evidence is still equally if not more important. The view of endogenous depression currently being advanced by academics does not correspond particularly well with some sufferers’ experience.

It is a well-known fact that many undiagnosed mental health and especially mood disorder patients self-medicate with drugs available off the street. I’ve known one whose symptoms matched mine very well, so I am fairly confident that had he been diagnosed, the diagnosis would have been endogenous depression. If the research is to be believed, the only effective treatment would have been a course of synthetic opioids to compensate for the low production of the endogenous opioid system; in fact, while he did self-administer various equivalents of both artisanal and pharmaceutical origin, his symptoms did not abate sufficiently. From my own experience, I can tell you that on the few occasions when I have been prescribed pain medication containing synthetic opioid compounds, I did not feel any relief from my endogenous depression symptoms whatsoever.

In short, while the current research may be applicable to some endogenous depression cases, it is clearly not applicable to all of them and/or to varying degrees. We certainly don’t yet have a full picture of the causes, which makes diagnosis and treatment as difficult as it currently is.

29 Comments

Thank you for this new site which gives good information on endogenous depression. I have suffered from this condition all my adult life and I can testify that it is very difficult for people to understand you when there is no reason they can see for your depressive mood. It just creeps up on you and then you are in the middle of it again and you wait for it to be over and to have some respite for a short period then it is back again and you ask yourself did it actually go away at all.I dont think in my lifetime those of us who suffer from this condition will ever be fully understood or cured because there is no push within the medical profession to research this illness or to help the public to understand this illness.

You are most welcome. I definitely agree with your sentiments (and feel your pain) about how difficult it is to deal with people not understanding your condition, in fact I’ve written quite a bit about that elsewhere on the site.

I would, however, urge you not to give up hope. The biggest problem we have in terms of understanding mood disorders is penetrating the blood-brain barrier and measuring/seeing what goes on in the brain in general. All it takes is one breakthrough and a lot of these impediments to further research go away. It doesn’t seem close, especially now with the cuts to fundamental research taking place all over the world, so for now we get to each figure out how to control our condition as best we can.